Edward Limonov - His Butler’s Story (1980-1981)

"Listen, Linda," I said, "what are you getting so upset about? Give me the letter and I'll hand it to him. And if I make a mistake, what's so awful about that? I only saw the gentlemen last night for a half an hour at most, and they never introduced themselves to me. I just opened the door for them, helped them bring their luggage in, and we immediately started talking about something… Let me have the letter and I'll find some way of handing it to him. I've got it, Linda!" it suddenly occurred to me. "I'll just say something like, 'Mr. Burdell, I have a letter for you from Steven' to both of them from a distance, and Mr. Burdell, and not the other guy, will answer and stick out his hand for the letter."

The whole Burdell business was terribly funny.

But do you know what she did? She didn't give me the letter but continued to grumble and called San Francisco, where the gentlemen were from, and asked Burdell's secretary what he looked like: "I'm sorry, dear, but I've got a problem here…" Secretaries form a worldwide brotherhood, or rather sisterhood, an international sisterhood that knows no boundaries. Burdell, it turned out, was the one with the beard and the curly hair. Looking at me triumphantly, Linda exultantly put the letter from Steven, which she'd written and typed herself of course, on the very top of the half dozen or so leather portfolios that were lying on her desk.

And when the two big lunks finally appeared in the kitchen, yawning and stretching, Linda with a happy click of her heels walked right up to the one she needed and said, "Mr. Burdell, welcome to Steven Grey's house. I hope you slept well!"

I almost burst out laughing right there in the kitchen when she handed Burdell the sacred letter. A half an hour later I fished it out of the waste basket. Written on beautiful paper with Gatsby's name and our address embossed at the top was no more than:

"Hi, Charles! Welcome! I trust you and your companion will be comfortable in my home and your weekend will be a pleasant one. I expect to fly into New York Monday evening at 6:30, and accordingly should be home by 7:00, and we will, I'm confident, have an excellent evening together. I'll call if I'm held up. Yours, Steven."

I had at the request of Linda herself conveyed the very same message to the gentlemen the evening before.

But Linda must be given her due. On one of my first days at work, I think, she said to me, "Edward! If I ever start to get on your nerves, or if I get too insistent about telling you how to live, don't be shy about it; just tell me to fuck off! Work is work," Linda went on, "and our relationship may get pretty tense at times, but don't pay any attention to it, just tell me to fuck off, and I won't be offended."

And I have told her more than once, and she's told me, and neither of us has gotten offended. Work is work, and we're building capitalism, Steven and Linda and I, sometimes successfully and sometimes not so successfully.

Although I do try to slip out of it and am even a little intimidated by it, I like the kitchen. Everybody likes it in fact, including Nancy, who spends the better part of her day there whenever she's in town, and even Steven, who comes into it quite often. All the other rooms in a sense distract us from the kitchen, its allure being somehow more ancient, a vestige of the caveman's desire for a hearth, and a kitchen is in fact all anyone needs for life. Everything else is an outgrowth of civilization, and we only waste the precious time on loan to us from chaos in going idly from one room to another and mulling over our inessential, our non-kitchen, objects and affairs.

Once I was sitting in the kitchen next to the window, a servant-philosopher, while outside it was getting dark and two boys were throwing a Frisbee in the street and quietly squealing with pleasure. A sunny fall day was coming to an end. I was drinking a beer and waiting for the boss. Maybe I shouldn't have waited for him — Linda says I don't have to — but it was possible Gatsby didn't have his key with him. That doesn't happen very often, but it's always possible, and so it's better to wait.

I sat and lazily thought about how nice it would be if Steven's plane went down with him in it. He's a bright person, no doubt about it, but he takes up too much space in my life; after me, he comes next. We are all engrossed in ourselves, but Steven is the other center around which my life revolves. There's no reason for that, I thought. It would be a good thing if the plane went down; my life should have just one center — me. I at once felt guilty, however. Did I have the right to such evil thoughts, did I have the right to wish for my boss's death? But Steven, if he were to find himself in my place by some whim of fate and circumstance, would probably have been thinking the same thing with his crazy temperament, would have been sitting next to the window and waiting for his boss Edward and probably would have wanted him to crash into the Atlantic Ocean too. That thought cheered me up.

Rights, rights, I thought. Who gives anybody the right to do anything? Is it my fault that I was born among the long cold ruins of Christianity, in the middle of this century in a godless country (whether that's good or bad, I cannot say), and that I've retained nothing, not the least little thing, from the Christian code of behavior in this world, or of any other code, and for that reason am compelled to devise my own code and decide for myself whether my actions and thoughts are good or bad? Is that my fault? And as far as Jenny was concerned, should I or should I not have indulged my incomprehensible loathing for her and have thought such bad things about her behind her back and have seen her as bad — as ugly, lazy, and farting? Maybe I needed to close my eyes and not see that, intentionally not see what was bad in her — refuse to notice the bad and see only the help she gave me and simply be grateful to her for everything she did for me, voluntarily or involuntarily? Maybe I didn't have the right to see her as ugly and shouldn't have noticed that pimple under her nose?

But how? I thought. I did try to love her, I really wanted to, but in spite of myself I slipped back into my merciless way of noticing the pettiest details, slipped back to my terrible unforgiving sight, to my vile, graphically honest thoughts. That's the secret, it suddenly occurred to me. I want to be honest with myself; I cannot consent to illusion and falsehood.

And in wishing that Steven would fall into the Atlantic Ocean along with his Concorde, I was also being maximally honest with myself, selfish, but honest. His visits bring me inconvenience, physical weariness, psychological distress, and a general repression in my life. They force me to live differently from my own notion of the way I ought to live, and that's why I wished him death. Is it really so shameful to wish death on your jailer, even if he's married and has children? When at eighteen I tried to persuade the paranoid Grisha to kill the orderlies so we could escape from the hospital where they were tormenting me, where they were injecting me with insulin, putting me in a coma, mutilating my psyche, and humiliating me, I was, biologically speaking, entirely in the right. Kill your tormentor!

I didn't want my boss to crash on land; that would have been too painful. It's somehow more innocuous and humane for a plane to fall into the ocean. In the ocean is better, I decided… But then it suddenly occurred to me that if Steven were gone, the power would pass to his heirs, and Nancy would inevitably sell the house — exactly, since she prefers living in the country with her horses and cows and had been grumbling to Steven that the New York house is a completely unnecessary luxury — and I'd lose my job and the possibility as a poor man of living on occasion the life of a rich one — a possibility and life unique in their own way. No, I thought, let the boss arrive safely after all. He's a decent guy, and if he's a bit hysterical, well what of it? We'll manage, we'll get through it somehow.